news you won't find in the mainstream media

After establishing in Part 1 of this article series that (1) tyrants accomplish their agenda through centralizing power, (2) the federal government has accomplished and is continuing to accomplish that agenda and (3) the tool of freemen is decentralization and separation from that agenda, I ended the article with this question: “What is the most effective manner to reinstitute and what political form of governments and unions will ensure self-government and decentralized power in America for the current generation and for our posterity?”

There are naturally and essentially two options to restore freedom in any given political structure: (1) work within the current system and (2) work outside of the current system. The United States’ sovereign beginning started with option 2, so the question before us is should we continue to use option 1 or prepare for option 2 (as our founding generation did), appealing the “Supreme Judge of the World for the rectitude of our intentions”?

Option 1: “Work Within the Current System”

For generations, the U.S. government system has been and continues to be saturated with socialist, communist, collectivists, statists, centralist and globalist principles. Since the late 1800s, the agenda of concentrated power has not changed course but has only intensified. Any real and substantive change of power back to individuals, states body-politic and their state governments in its original form is as revolutionary as any other method of revolution and in fact cannot be accomplished as the union exist today.

When a certain form has been so manipulated, corrupted, twisted and mangled, the laws of nature demand that a new form be shaped to accomplish the purposes for which the original form was instituted--that freedom may live, prosper and grow.

A nation-wide freedom revolution within the current system is much less likely to be realized than just about any other form of revolution. The fundamentally conflicting views and beliefs concerning government’s purpose essentially doom the efforts of self-government and self-determination and leads to a pinnacle of conflict. Consequently, much time, energy, money, resources and freedom are lost in the ineffectual process: concentration of power intensifies and continues to take its evolutionary building course.

Rahm Emanuel is, so it seems, the American most hated by the leaders of Israel. He is considered the most dangerous opponent of the Netanyahu government in the White House. Behind closed doors, they shower him – if one is to believe the media – with anti-Semitic epithets. “Jewboy” is one of them. In Zionist usage, he is a “self-hating Jew.”

And lo and behold, here he is strolling around the Galilee in shorts. He visits the occupied Golan Heights, which foreign diplomats normally take great pains to avoid. The IDF flies him between its installations. He prays at the Western Wall. A good Jewish tourist from America.

Emanuel’s son has reached the age of bar mitzvah; where better to celebrate than the Land of Israel, where his grandfather was a member of the Irgun – an outfit that the U.S. administration would have branded a terrorist organization, like Hamas today.

In short, the self-hating Jewboy has revealed himself as a Zionist with a warm Jewish heart, an admirer of the IDF and a supporter of the annexation of the Golan Heights.

The distinguished economist and historian William Engdahl provides must reading with this book. A Century of War once again proves Santayana's dictum, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." (And proves George Bernard Shaw's corollary, "We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.")

The theme running throughout the book is the ruthless corporate and governmental pursuit of the magic moneymaker, Oil. And the unremitting subversion and wars to seize black gold. Engdahl describes the US and UK corporations and governments as international predators, occasionally as rivals (in earlier times), but normally as an axis of financial and military power bent on capturing the petroleum resources of the world.

Let us go through portions of the book in outline, paraphrasing fashion (although sometimes quoting), showing its thrust and sweep. [Bracketed comments will be mine; emphases also mine]:

early 20th century -- Serbia as the first line of defense of UK eastern possessions. [hence the strategic position of the Balkans, and the unfortunate position of Serbia -- see 1990's US-UK subversion and war against Yugoslavia, and demonisation of the excellent nationalistic leader, Milosevic, who refused the IMF's kiss-of-death funding]

By 1902, large reserves of petroleum believed to exist in Iraq and Kuwait, soon to be validated.

1913 -- British Government secretly buys up a majority share ownership of Anglo-Persia Oil (later called British Petroleum). "From this point, OIL was the core of British strategic interest.”

Flip on the TV, peruse the Internet, or page through the average magazine on the newsstand today, and it is difficult to ignore the obvious: America’s moral values seem to be slipping to new lows every year. Images that would have rated swift condemnation from our nation’s religious leaders (and likely a fine from the FCC) just a few short years ago are now standard fare on today’s television screens. Profanity that few sailors would have been caught uttering in mixed company in previous generations now falls freely from the lips of teens and young adults. And behaviors that once would have been unthinkable in civilized society are now embraced by whole communities as basic rights.

While it may seem that a majority of Americans are turning a blind eye to this moral slide — or view it as the normal evolution of an enlightened society — a recent national survey suggests that many Americans are taking note, and harbor concerns over the direction our nation is headed.

Each year the Gallup organization polls a cross section of the American population on the state of the nation’s moral values, and this year the study found that Americans are three times more likely to describe the current moral state as “poor” than as “excellent” or “good.” While the opinion the average American has about U.S. morality “has never been positive,” an official summary of the Gallup study noted, this year’s assessment ranks “among the worst Gallup has measured over the past nine years.”

According to this year’s survey, which polled 1,029 adults nationwide in early May, over 75 percent of Americans think that the nation’s moral values are worsening, compared to 14 percent who say they are improving. Those Americans who think the nation’s moral values are getting worse cited a variety of reasons for the slide, including a decline in parents instilling solid values in their children, negative moral values being demonstrated by the nation’s government and business leaders, a rise in crime and violence, a decreasingly positive influence by religious institutions, and the breakdown of the traditional two-parent family.

Beck, not long ago, discussed how the station and his show has recently done the investigation, where a woman who was investigating came to tears after realizing what she had uncovered – the unmasking of World Governance, Crime Inc. (the current Federal Government), the bogus nature of climate change, etc. In short, Beck is bringing to light everything Alex Jones has been discussing for years less the biggest piece of the puzzle – 9/11 and the act that justified the biggest means – the Patriot Act and loss of Miranda rights in the United States.

We can all recall Naomi Wolf’s book, “The End of America”, where she describes with horror the steps that a fascist government undergoes to effect a police state.

Again, it is odd to have Beck now call out “global governance” as a newly discovered idea, that he would give credit to his network for unmasking. According to Beck, “nobody else is reporting this”. We all know better now don’t we?

While Beck states you do not need to look at the Bilderbergers to explain this, we all know that we do.

Not long ago, we reported on Beck’s apparent skirting around the issue of the New World Order and its agenda. He even went so far as to challenge Damon Vickers on bringing it up on CNBC, and he argued with Vickers that it could all be explained away by Cloward, Piven, and the Progressive agenda.

Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) has announced that nearly a dozen and a half states are now filing versions of Arizona’s S.B. 1070 law, designed to help local police enforce America’s existing immigration laws.

Various polls have indicated that close to 75 percent of the U.S. population supports Arizona’s move and wants their own states to do the same.

“Our national network of activists has been working overtime trying to help the state of Arizona and the brave Arizonans who have passed this bill,” said William Gheen, president of the activist group. “Arizona no longer stands alone, and we have now documented state lawmakers filing, or announcing they will file, versions of the Arizonan bill in 17 states. We will not stop until all states are protected from invasion as required by the U.S. Constitution.”

ALIPAC has documented that the following 17 states are taking a page out of Arizona’s book in response to citizen pressure: Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas and Utah.

The network also seems to be carrying on where Rachel Maddow left off with its attack on Rand Paul. Following the release of a falsified transcript from the Maddow interview, the network devoted a full day to attacking and smearing Paul last week, painting up the mild mannered son of Congressman Ron Paul as some kind of virulent racist extremist.

No doubt the ridiculous attempt to smear the anti-establishment candidate for the Senate will continue in this special.

MSNBC is the epitome of the controlled corporate mainstream media, being as it is 80% owned by General Electric, operated by military industrial complex giant General Dynamics, whose primary business comes from supplying arms and weapons systems to the US government and its international allies. It is not and never has been sympathetic to anti-establishment or anti-war activism – this is the same network that cancelled Jesse Ventura’s talk show simply because he opposed the Iraq war.

It is not surprising that Chris Matthews throws around the “dangerous right winger” label as often as he does, given that he admits he analyzes politics “from a Marxist perspective” and that his idol is Communist ideologue Saul Alinsky. If you chart Matthews on the political scale, virtually everyone resides to the right of his views, simply because they are not hardcore Communists

At 5:21 PM on 9/11, Building 7 of the World Trade Center collapsed, even though it had not been hit by a plane – a fact that is important because of the widespread acceptance of the idea, in spite of its scientific absurdity, that the Twin Towers collapsed because of the combined effect of the impact of the airliners plus the ensuing jet-fuel-fed fires. The collapse of World Trade Center 7 (WTC 7) thereby challenges the official account of the destruction of the World Trade Center, according to which it was accomplished by al-Qaeda hijackers, even if one accepts the government’s scientifically impossible account of the Twin Towers. This fact was recently emphasized in the title of a review article based on my 2009 book, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7,1 by National Medal of Science-winner Lynn Margulis: “Two Hit, Three Down – The Biggest Lie.”2

Through these and related means, the truth about the collapse of WTC 7 has been effectively hidden, even though it has existed in plain sight all these years. Even the bare fact of the collapse itself has been so effectively hidden that in 2006 over 40 percent of the American public did not know about it, and in 2009 a judge in New York City, upon hearing a reference to Building 7, asked: “Building what?”

I offer this essay as a case study in the power of the forces behind SCADs or deep events to hide things that exist in plain sight, because if they can hide the straight-down free-fall collapse of a 47-story building captured on video in broad daylight, they can hide almost anything.

I say this, however, not to instill despair, but to point to the seriousness of the problem, and also to pave the way for making a proposal. Recognizing the high correlation between those who know about the collapse of WTC 7 and those who believe that a new – or rather real – 9/11 investigation is needed, I propose that the international 9/11 Truth Movement initiate, starting this September, a world-wide, year-long “Building What?” campaign. Through this campaign, we would seek to make the fact of its collapse so widely known that the mention of Building 7 would never again evoke the question: “Building What?”94

The most candid and compelling summary of this perspective doesn't come from a right-wing revisionist, but rather from Columbia Law School Professor George P. Fletcher, an establishment academic of an unabashedly Marxist bent.

In his valuable book The Secret Constitution, Fletcher acknowledges that the war waged by Abraham the Annihilator was not an effort to "preserve the Union," much less to restore the pre-war constitutional order. Instead, that war was intended to consolidate the united States into a unitary state governed by what Fletcher calls a "New Constitutional Order." In the New Order, writes Fletcher, the founding premise is that "the federal government, victorious in warfare, must continue its aggressive intervention in the lives of its citizens." (Emphasis added.)

There is nothing hypothetical about the federal aggression Fletcher correctly identifies as the central feature of the post-Lincoln Soyuz (the term "union" is inapposite here). Since, from the perspective Fletcher represents, Lincoln's war supposedly settled the question of the central government's "authority" to kill Americans in any quantity necessary to reconfigure society, there are no limits to what it can do in the interest of establishing "social justice."

"Civil rights," as the term is used today, has nothing to do with the rights of individuals apart from the role played by some members of designated classes as a pretext for federal violations of the property rights of others not granted such protected status. Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor at Princeton and self-appointed watchdog of the "radical right," makes that point with the eager earnestness of someone who assumes that her political opponents aren't listening.

Which brings us to Rep. Joe Sestak’s claim that he was offered an administration job if he would abandon his race against Sen. Arlen Specter for the Democratic nomination in Pennsylvania. Reportedly, the job offered to the retired admiral was secretary of the navy.

On May 18, Sestak won that primary, and his charge that he was proffered a White House bribe, or deal, went viral.

So, today, Joe has a problem. And so does the White House.

For if Sestak was offered a high post in the administration to abandon his challenge to a U.S. senator endorsed by Obama, this would seem on its face a criminal violation of federal law.

All seven Senate Republicans on the judiciary committee have written Attorney General Eric Holder calling for an independent counsel to investigate the alleged bribe. They cite 18 U.S. Code Section 600, which forbids the offer of any government job “as consideration, favor or reward for any political activity” or “in connection with any primary election or political convention or caucus held to select candidates for any political office.”

Bilderberg-controlled news outlets in Europe and the Western Hemisphere are conditioning the public to accept two of the super-secret elite’s major goals in advance of its meeting June 4-7 in Sitges, Spain: a U.S. attack on Iran and a financial bailout of Greece and other European Union (EU) countries.

The Bilderberg-controlled Washington Post called for making the IMF a “global overseer” on May 20. Bilderberg is exploiting the financial crisis in Greece and other EU countries to advance efforts to make the IMF a world Treasury Department under the UN.

“It may take a global agency like the IMF” to address the problem, The Post said, attributing the view to Liliana Rojas-Suarez, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development.

Bilderberg warmongering continues. Following instructions from Russian Mikhail Slobodinsky (at the Trilateralist meeting [AFP May 24, 2010]), Russia and China joined in supporting a resolution condemning Iran’s imaginary “nuclear weapons program.” Israel restated that air strikes are not “off the table.”

The Bilderberg-Trilateral goal is for the U.S. to conduct air strikes on Iran, paid for with American taxpayer dollars and blood. Israel has had nuclear weapons since at least 1962, is not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and refuses on-site inspections.

Irrespective of their politics, flawed leaders share a common trait. They generally remain remarkably oblivious to the harm they do to the nation they lead. George W. Bush is a salient recent example, as is former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. When it comes to foreign policy, we are now witnessing a similar phenomenon at the Obama White House.

Here is the Obama pattern: Choose a foreign leader to pressure. Threaten him with dire consequences if he does not bend to Washington’s will. When he refuses to submit and instead responds vigorously, back off quickly and overcompensate for failure by switching into a placatory mode.

In his first year-plus in office, Barack Obama has provided us with enough examples to summarize his leadership style. The American president fails to objectively evaluate the strength of the cards that a targeted leader holds and his resolve to play them.

Obama’s propensity to retreat at the first sign of resistance shows that he lacks both guts and the strong convictions that are essential elements distinguishing statesmen from politicians. By pursuing a rudderless course in his foreign policy, by flip-flopping in his approach to other leaders, he is also inadvertently furnishing hard evidence to those who argue that American power is on the decline — and that the downward slide of the globe’s former "sole superpower" is irreversible.

The movement's "ruling passion is a belief in the ability of the ordinary citizen to make decisions for himself or herself without the guidance or ‘help' of experts and professionals." We've delegated responsibility for our "core institutions"—public schools and colleges, health care, finance, retirement, government at all levels-to those experts, and all of them "cost more than we can pay," but "don't do what we need."

At the same time, the things that the governing structures now perform badly are things that really do need to be done, and done well. Conservatives have to finish the sentence, to explain how shrewdly delimited government can succeed where sloppy, undisciplined government has failed. Conservatives could offer "innovative leadership" with the help of a "new cohort of smart policy wonks with a practical vision for the future," according to Mead. The political problem is that the Tea Party populists may not accede to a conservative agenda set by a different set of experts and professionals. Populists "want big and simple ideas," Mead writes, not "intricate, finely crafted reforms whose beauty can only be appreciated by a few." If there's hope for a conservative coalition that overcomes those tensions, it resides in the constant awareness of a much bigger governmental and even civilizational threat—that the "dysfunction of the current system" will drive us "into a massive social and financial crisis."

The Tea Party mission can be described in another way. What's at stake in the war conservatives have declared on Obamacare is not only 18% of our economy, but 100% of our polity. If the anger over what the Democrats enacted, and the way they passed it, is replaced by acquiescence, America will have taken a big step toward having not only policies but political processes that are indistinguishable from Europe's. If the people who brought you Obamacare are not rebuked in the elections of 2010 and 2012, they, emboldened, will pursue further social transformations, regardless of popular opposition. Our ruling elites will eagerly adopt their European counterparts' posture toward the people: You are wrong. We know better. We will do this, and you will like it. To permit Obamacare to stand is to permit such an assertion to go unchallenged, and guarantee that it will become routine. By their passivity, the people will be complicit in their own disempowerment. As Frederick Douglass said in 1857, "Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them."

If any proof that Democrat's panic and desperation over the prospects of losing their control over Capitol Hill this coming November is required you need only look at their reaction to Dr. Rand Paul's landslide victory in the Kentucky primary election.

Seen as a harbinger of things to come, Dr. Paul's crushing defeat of a more or less moderate Republican opponent, showed the power of the nation's discontent with the current state of the Union under the confused leadership of Barack Obama and his feckless administration.

The impression created by Dr. Paul's triumph was the realization that the Tea Party is what it claims to be, a widespread movement not only vehemently opposed to the works and pomps of the Obama presidency but one determined to use its hefty clout at the polls. It demonstrated that clout in the Kentucky primary by defeating the GOP establishment and choosing a candidate who embraced their philosophy of a limited federal government as defined in the U.S. Constitution.

One needs to be blind to fail to see what is at work here. The likes of the Rand Paul movement scares to daylights out of the national Democratic establishment and they are determined to strangle it in its Kentucky crib before it can grow into a national nightmare that strips them of control of the United States Congress this year, and of the presidency two years hence.

I'm shocked to hear about Rand Paul's recent caving-in to the liberal-neocon establishment. From the evidence it would seem that our minimal-government senatorial candidate from Kentucky regrets he could not have marched with MLK during the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s. Never mind the fact that vocal opposition to King and to both his tactics and rhetoric extended from National Review (when it was still a recognizably conservative publication) to the New York Times, and from WFB to Will Herberg, and Harry Jaffa. We are now supposed to bow down before all the authorized Civil Rights Icons, and this is especially true for Republicans, whose electoral support among blacks since they began their ritualistic groveling has shrunk from about 10 to two percent. With a little more kowtowing, the GOP and Rand Paul may succeed in driving the numbers even lower.

As for Rand Paul's comment that set off the media hysteria, it was bland enough to have been ignored, if GOP magnates and civil rights leaders had not weighed in. Does Congressman (and House Minority Leader) John Boehner honestly believe that Paul's failure to back every jot in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, including the enforcement of non-discrimination in accommodations in Title I, would cause a mass defection of his otherwise likely voters to the opposition? Will Paul's share of the black vote now shrink because of his seemingly tactless reservation about one title in the Civil Rights Act? How the hell can the GOP get "government off our backs," if Title I and the agency it requires for its enforcement legitimate constant government incursions into the workplace?

The worst form of government incursion I can think of is the relentless attempt by public administrators to socialize us in accordance with the latest formulations of PC. What Rand Paul suggested during a lucid moment is that we might begin our counteroffensive by reconsidering the government's mandate to re-educate us socially and culturally, a mandate that the Civil Rights Act most definitely provides. Given the purpose that the candidate wished to pursue, it seems that he was offering an exceedingly modest beginning to an almost insuperable task. A more reasonable beginning is to repeal the entire act and all the federal directives imposed afterwards in pursuit of non-discrimination everywhere in our society. The same thing should be attempted at the state level, although the states have more constitutional right on their side when they engage in leftist social engineering.

This brings me back to the point I've made before, about Republican pathologies, from which Rand Paul has apparently not escaped. GOP candidates feel driven to ingratiate themselves with those who despise them. In contrast, Democrats, and particularly liberal Democrats, behave with more dignity. They have no trouble writing off those groups they're not likely to attract. By the way: I'm still waiting for Chuck Schumer to apologize to Bob Jones University for having failed to take biblical Christian moral positions as a senator. I'm also waiting for Hillary to address the Right to Life organization and to promise to devote the remainder of her life to fighting abortion.

The reason that "the masses" are a lot more prosperous and even civilized is that they have been participating in our free-market economy for years. It has made their lives easier, and they recognize it. As Arthur Brooks, the urbane president of the American Enterprise Institute, demonstrates in his new book, The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America's Future, seventy percent of Americans favor free enterprise, with only a glum thirty percent turning their tremulous palms up to the nanny state.

At any rate, after talking with thousands of ordinary Americans on talk radio and at book receptions, I have come to the conclusion that America has arrived at a historic turning point. It is not just that Tea Partiers are revolting against big government. It is something more. Usually a revolt against big government has meant that restive Americans wanted their taxes lowered, but as for cutting government back they were vague. They favored economies but certainly no cutbacks in their entitlements -- a loaded word, that, entitled to whom from what? -- or government subsidies. What makes this a historic moment is that growing numbers of Americans now accept that they too are going to have to forego at least some of their so-called entitlements. They recognize that the budget crisis is that grave.

For well over a decade simple demographics suggested that a budget crisis loomed for such programs as Social Security. Yet our politicians -- as the phrase had it -- merely kicked the can down the road. We have now arrived at the end of the road. What hastened our arrival at this dead end was the profligacy of the most inexperienced and left-wing president in American history. Budgetary overhang was ominous when the Prophet Obama arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Then he confected the Troubled Asset Relief Program, a $787 billion stimulus package, a hugely imbalanced budget, and his trillion-dollar healthcare monstrosity that he lyrically promised would save a trillion dollars. All told, it has been the largest increase in federal spending since World War II.

During times of growth, federal spending is usually in the neighborhood of 20 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). It is now rising from 21 percent of GDP to 25 percent. As a percentage of GDP, the national debt will double within a decade unless the citizenry gets control of the budget. From my travels among the citizenry, I have come to the conclusion that Americans are they are ready to do so. This fall they will elect representatives who will cut their entitlements. That will be a new day in American politics.

During a speech at West Point, Obama pledged to assist in shaping a new "international order" to help secuire America's safety and emphasized his faith in global institutions. He envisions the US taking a prominent role in shaping a new world with Democratic global values.

We may compare his speech to that of President George Herbert Walker Bush in 1990 and 1991 just before and again after what became known now as Gulf War 1. The elder President Bush spoke of "a thousand points of light" in reference to a "New World Order" and repeated that phrase during his clarion calls for global governance. Obama is signalling his pledge to the Illuminist cause and to his puppet masters as he orders steps taken to gear up the United States for a military clash in the Middle East.

We note that last week, President Obama quietly ordered a massive U.S. military buildup in the Middle East consisting of vast muntions transfers to U.S. bases in the Mideast region along with a US Navy aircraftt carrier battle group, (the USS Truman) along with 4 other carrier battle groups to arrive in the region in the next 60 to 90 days.

President Obama's speech at America's primary university for educating future generals suggests the President is sending a confirmation signal that he is prepared to order U.S. military forces into an engagement that will take another step forward in fulfilling the Illuminati agenda for a new "international order" - "one that can resolve the challenges of our tiems." He went on to describe this "order" and its agenda:

If you are willing to spend 90 minutes watching the following series of nine videos or lessons which cover the nature and reality of neoclassical economics in today’s world, you will understand far more than you ever did before about how finance works. First, we would like to introduce a few observations, weaknesses and some issues on which we part paths with the author of the videos.

These videos are a far cry from the Zeitgeist movies you may have seen. They are far more educational. The first three videos are fairly dry but lay the groundwork to understand the rest. So they require a little more work on the viewers part. Some understandably complain that the author speaks too fast and is difficult to follow in these videos. In the remaining videos Damon Vrabel* warms things up with applications to our own humanity - and the inhumanity of “the owners”.

Axis of Logic’s manifesto has always regarded the Global Corporate Empire (GCE) as being the root of all evil for mankind. The GCE is a result of the financial system of debt creation which emerged with the founding of the Federal Reserve System in December 1913 and the Anglo-American empire. These two entities control the issuance and supply of money based on debt and servitude – in contrast to the widely yet wrongly held notions of wealth and freedom as propagated in our educational and media systems. One important point of disagreement we have with the Vrabel's lessons is related to his references to "free market economics". We find agreement with the words of a friend whom we asked to critique the presentation:

"Implicit in the presentation is the idea that a free market would be good if we had one. The emphasis [in the videos] of course is that we don’t have one ... In fact, the ideology behind a free market society, competition to maximize personal profit, leads exactly to what we have today, and if we went back to a mom and pop free market society it would probably lead to the same kind of society again."

Rand Paul has taken a principled — but politically incorrect — position, for which he's being pilloried. A look behind the 6-second-sound-bite version of his position might be helpful.

Despite how his comments have played, Paul has said he is glad that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed. He accepts the Civil Rights Act as settled U.S. law — not to be revisited by the courts despite possible constitutional infirmities.

But, though the Supreme Court upheld the 1964 act, the law has a disputable constitutional pedigree. The Civil Rights Act addresses the conduct of private individuals, so it is not easily shoehorned into the 14th Amendment, which constrains only government conduct. And the act has nothing to do with reducing state-imposed obstacles to the free flow of interstate trade — so it should not have been legitimized under an original understanding of the commerce clause.

Still, the law was affirmed — and deservedly so — by the court because it helped erase an unconscionable assault on human dignity.

So Paul stands foursquare for civil rights but acknowledges the Civil Rights Act's possible disconnect from the Constitution. His position is therefore intellectually honest, unlike those who insist that, because the Civil Rights Act is beneficent, it must necessarily be constitutional.

One of the things that fascinate me about the Rand Paul controversy is how it is exposing the longtime confluence of conservatives and liberals. For 20 years, I’ve been arguing that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between a conservative and a liberal — or, if you will, Depublicans and Remocrats — and the liberal-conservative reaction to the Paul controversy is confirming my point.

Every one of those programs entails the socialist principle of using the force of the state to take money from people to whom it rightfully belongs in order to give it to others.

I ask you: What liberal does not ardently believe in every one of those programs? What conservative doesn’t also believe in them? Oh, they might argue over which reform should be adopted to deal with the ever-increasing economic crises that come with such programs. But they’d never challenge the nature or existence of the programs themselves. They have come to believe that it is an important role of government to use the force of government to take from Peter to give to Paul.

In modern times, The Rothschild family is often referred to as archetypal capitalists who were Europe's wealthiest family from 1820 onward and gained this position through their ability to exploit the capitalist system--this widely held view is completely false. The Rothschild family was indeed the Continent's wealthiest family throughout the nineteenth century but they gained this position through the exploitation of governments. Therefore, The Rothschilds should not be labeled as capitalists but rather another group of people in bed with governments, at an enormous scale.

200 years later, this misnomer not only still exists but is probably the most pervasive and deleterious aspect of modern economic thought. People continue to blame society's problems on freedom while neglecting the incessant cronyism, corporatism and government expansion that permeates the economy. This notion was repugnant in the early years of American society which is why the Rothschild family had such difficulty penetrating The United States economy.

Traditionally, The Rothschild family conducted business in countries where they had strong relations with the governments of those nations; otherwise they refused. In the 1830s and 40s, this presented a huge dichotomy to the five Rothschild brothers who were scattered across Europe's financial cities because they also recognized the large economic growth taking place in the United States indicating enormous potential for profits. Not only did the family lack a strong relationship with the federal government but The United States was also in the midst of major financial reform revolving around Andrew Jackson's abolition of the Bank of the United States (BUS).

In the 1998 widely acclaimed book "The House of Rothschild: Money's Prophets 1798-1848" by Niall Ferguson, the author notes:

A group of Italian economists led by Franco Debenedetti of the famous financier clan and the banker Paolo Savona, obviously fearful that the Berlusconi-Tremonti government of Italy will join last Tuesday’s successful German ban on the type of toxic derivative known as the naked credit default swap, have sent an alarmed warning to the Corriere della Sera of Milan1. Debenedetti has contributed an article expressing similar sentiments to the Italian business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore in which he rails at the “Mrs. Merkel market” now in force in Germany2. These economists, obviously inspired by the doctrines of Friedrich von Hayek and the Austrian school, want Italy to remain faithful no matter what to the widely discredited ideas of laissez-faire economics, even as those doctrines are everywhere under attack for having caused the current world economic depression. For these neoliberal and monetarist thinkers, any attempt to ban derivatives or tax speculation must be condemned as “economic populism,” which for these writers is a term of opprobrium.

These anti-populist economists need to be reminded of some basic facts about derivatives. The collapse of the Central European banking system in the summer of 1931 was decisively enabled by derivatives – specifically by speculation in wool futures by a north German textile company which brought down the Danat Bank, leading to panic runs on all German banks. Thanks to the American New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, most over-the-counter and exchange-traded derivatives were illegal from 1936 to 1982 under the Commodities Exchange Act, which was repealed by the free-market enthusiast Ronald Reagan. During those years, US rates of economic growth and real wages were far superior to what they have been any time since, and financial panics were much more limited than they had been before or have become since. Presumably, FDR would be dismissed as a mere populist.

In today’s crisis, we are confronted at every turn with the fatal combination of deregulated hedge funds plus these now-rehabilitated derivatives, which in the meantime amount to a world speculative bubble of some $1.5 quadrillion of notional value. Lehman Brothers, Citibank, and Merrill Lynch were destroyed by derivatives in the form of a combination of their issuance of synthetic collateralized debt obligations based on mortgages and consumer debt, together with the credit default swaps used by hedge funds to attack these banks. The insurance company AIG had a hedge fund in London which issued $3 trillion worth of derivatives (more than the GDP of France), featuring a very toxic portfolio of credit default swaps. The failure of AIG caused by these toxic bets has now cost the US taxpayer $180 billion and counting. The attack on Greece, as these economists seem to recognize, was organized during a dinner party in Manhattan on February 8, 2010, leader reported in the headline story of the Wall Street Journal on February 26, 20103. European taxpayers are now on the hook for almost $1 trillion in bailouts as a result of this speculation. That Manhattan hedge fund dinner seems to fulfill the prima facie specifications of an illegal conspiracy in restraint of trade under the terms of the US Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, a law proposed all those years ago by a very Republican senator and signed by Benjamin Harrison, a very Republican president. Were they populists too?

The top American commander in the Middle East has ordered a broad expansion of clandestine military activity in an effort to disrupt militant groups or counter threats in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and other countries in the region, according to defense officials and military documents.

The secret directive, signed in September by Gen. David H. Petraeus, authorizes the sending of American Special Operations troops to both friendly and hostile nations in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa to gather intelligence and build ties with local forces. Officials said the order also permits reconnaissance that could pave the way for possible military strikes in Iran if tensions over its nuclear ambitions escalate.

While the Bush administration had approved some clandestine military activities far from designated war zones, the new order is intended to make such efforts more systematic and long term, officials said. Its goals are to build networks that could “penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy” Al Qaeda and other militant groups, as well as to “prepare the environment” for future attacks by American or local military forces, the document said. The order, however, does not appear to authorize offensive strikes in any specific countries.

In broadening its secret activities, the United States military has also sought in recent years to break its dependence on the Central Intelligence Agency and other spy agencies for information in countries without a significant American troop presence.

"Gentlemen, what we have here is a constitutional crisis," he said. "If what I've been told is true — and I believe it is — General David Petraeus, a commander with soldiers deployed in two theaters of war, has had multiple meetings with Dick Cheney, the former vice-president of the United States, to discuss Petraeus's candidacy for the Republican nomination for the presidency. And in fact, that's more than a constitutional crisis. That's treason."

One month before, in early January, Congressman Massa had called me and sketched out the bare bones of the tale he was now propounding. Four retired generals, he said — "three four-stars and one three-star" — had picked up disturbing reports that Petraeus, the commander of United States Central Command, whose portfolio contains the worst trouble spots on the globe, including Iraq and Afghanistan, had recently met with Cheney — twice — and Cheney was trying to recruit him to run in 2012. Were he to be the nominee, Massa said, Petraeus would be in the unprecedented position of a military man running for president against his own commander in chief.

"We have to see this for what it is," Massa said, his voice pleading. "There is a reason that we have in this country civilian leadership of the military. It is, among other things, to avoid something like this. Because in order to succeed electorally, General Petraeus must fail militarily. You understand? In order to succeed electorally, he must fail in his mission. Were he to run and win — and if he were to run, he would win in a landslide — we would be witness to an American coup d'état. It is the functional equivalent of the political overthrow of the commander in chief."

The congressman punctuated his sentence with a snort of indignation, followed by a short, high laugh. He searched the three other faces in the room for affirmation, any sign at all that we understood the gravity of the situation, because he had to that point been living alone with this unseemly knowledge. For a moment, he was met with silence. The story Massa had just told was staggering, and confusing. And just who was this man sitting before us? His eyes were wide and his voice thundered and a couple of times he seemed just short of hyperventilating. But if this story that four generals — "people whose names you know, very prominent military men" — had brought to him had any basis in fact, and if Petraeus were deliberately undermining his commander in chief, shouldn't somebody be bellowing about it?

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

That was the slogan of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s “1984,” where Winston Smith worked ceaselessly revising the past to conform to the latest party line of Big Brother.

And so we come to the battle over history books in the schools of Texas. Liberals are enraged that a Republican-dominated Board of Education is rewriting the texts. But is the rewrite being done to falsify history, or to undo a liberal bias embedded for decades?

Consider a few of the issues.

The new texts will emphasize that the separation of church and state was never written into the Constitution.

President Lee Myung-bak said on Monday that his government will “immediately exercise its right of self-defense” if North Korea violates its territory again, as he announced a set of countermeasures against the North which sank a South Korean warship in March.

“From now on, the Republic of Korea will not tolerate any provocative act by the North and will maintain the principle of proactive deterrence,” Lee said during a televised address to the nation.

"If our territorial waters, airspace or territory are militarily violated, we will immediately exercise our right of self-defense.”

Lee defined the Cheonan’s sinking as “a surprise North Korean torpedo attack,” saying that it “constitutes a military provocation against the ROK.”

This month, three members of Congress have been beaten in their bids for re-election -- a Republican senator from Utah, a Democratic congressman from West Virginia and a Republican-turned-Democrat senator from Pennsylvania. Their records and their curricula vitae are different. But they all have one thing in common: They are members of an appropriations committee.

Like most appropriators, they have based much of their careers on bringing money to their states and districts. There is an old saying on Capitol Hill that there are three parties -- Democrats, Republicans and appropriators. One reason that it has been hard to hold down government spending is that appropriators of both parties have an institutional and political interest in spending.

Their defeats are an indication that spending is not popular this year. So is the decision, shocking to many Democrats, of House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey to retire after a career of 41 years. Obey maintains that the vigorous campaign of a young Republican in his district didn't prompt his decision. But his retirement is evidence that, suddenly this year, pork is not kosher.

It has long been a maxim of political scientists that American voters are ideologically conservative and operationally liberal. That is another way of saying that they tend to oppose government spending in the abstract but tend to favor spending on particular programs. It's another explanation of why the culture of appropriators continued to thrive after the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 and during the eight years of George W. Bush's presidency.

Time magazine wrote: "This is how it goes in 2010 at the ballot box: old orders are upended, political lions become roadkill, chosen successors get left behind and the outsider, riding a wave of discontent, becomes the new front runner."

The Associated Press wrote: "It's an anti-Washington, anti-establishment year. And candidates with ties to either better beware. Any doubt about just how toxic the political environment is for congressional incumbents and candidates hand-picked by national Republican and Democratic leaders disappeared late Tuesday."

No. Voters said: "It's not the incumbents, stupid. It's how they voted. It's what they stand for." No incumbent who voted against the Bush/Obama bank bailouts, the "stimulus" package and ObamaCare lost his or her job.

Voters hate the bank bailouts. They hate the government takeover of car companies. They do not believe that the $800 billion stimulus package stimulated anything but bigger government. They reject ObamaCare and think it's costly and likely to worsen health care. Incumbents who voted for these things now face the music.

There was a brief period in the 1990s when it looked like the right was going to have a paleo moment. Pat Buchanan barely lost to Bob Dole in Iowa and beat him in New Hampshire. Republican members of Congress were railing against "nation-building" abroad and filing lawsuits to keep Bill Clinton from going to war in the Balkans. And Tom Pauken was the chairman of the Texas Republican Party.

In the following decade, both the Republicans and the conservative movement traveled in a very different direction. There were many reasons for this, of course -- Clinton's presidency came to an end and, with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, so did the post-Cold War "peace dividend." But Pauken's rivals in the Texas GOP, George W. Bush and Karl Rove, played a very significant role. Compassionate conservatism replaced government-slashing; soothing rhetoric about faith-based initiatives replaced Buchananesque speeches about the culture war; the "humble foreign policy" of candidate Bush gave way to the president's Bush Doctrine.

Around the same time Rove published his memoir, Tom Pauken -- a Goldwater-era conservative activist who served in the Nixon and Reagan administrations -- released his book Bringing America Home, painting a very un-Rovian picture of what the Republican Party and the conservative movement should look like. Pauken might have titled it The Conscience of a Paleoconservative.

The country caught a glimpse of Pauken's vision last week, when Tea Party insurgent Rand Paul triumphed over GOP establishment favorite Trey Grayson in Kentucky's Republican primary for U.S. Senate. That contest pitted economic and social conservatives against national-security hawks who were unmoved by Paul's appeals for smaller government -- and alarmed by his more restrained view of foreign policy. (Though the firestorm over Paul's post-election musings about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a reminder of the foot-in-mouth disease that can afflict paleo politicians.)

The US Senate’s passage of the Obama administration’s financial reform bill Thursday was hailed in the media and by official Washington as a landmark effort to curb the power of the big banks. But on Wall Street itself, the news was greeted with a mixture of dismissal and applause.

There is a striking and politically illuminating contrast between the market reaction and the populist phrases mouthed by Democratic politicians in Washington. Harry Reid, the Democrat majority leader in the Senate, boasted, “When this bill becomes law, the joyride on Wall Street will come to a screeching halt.”

As the super-secret Trilateral Commission (TC) was meeting behind locked and guarded doors at the luxurious Four Seasons resort hotel in Dublin, Ireland May 8, participants were upset to learn that awareness of their evildoings was surging in the United States.

The same day, the Republican Party of Maine threw out its Establishment-approved platform and adopted a manifesto that denounced “efforts to create a one-world government,” called for abolishing the Federal ReserveSystem and ridiculed global warming as a “myth.” Each of these matters is dear to the hearts of members of the Trilateral Commission and its brother group, Bilderberg. Their traditional goal is world government, and these stateless plutocrats have exploited the hysteria over “global warming” for profit.

Maine’s Republicans also praised the tea party movement and support Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) and his son Rand Paul, who won the GOP Senate primary in Kentucky May 18. Maine’s Republicans said, “Healthcare is not a right.” They say, “Eliminate Motor Voter”; “Reject the UN Treaty on the Rights of the Child”; “Eliminate the Department of Education”; “Arrest and detain . . . anyone here illegally, and then deport [him], period.”

Similar demands are being made by a growing number of congressmen and other officials throughout the country, and this is distressing to the Trilateral-Bilderberg elite. The health control law proclaims a “right” to care and imposes an unconstitutional requirement that private citizens buy private healthcare or pay a fine. Yet the central government has no constitutional power to compel individuals to buy any product from a private party.

I saw a wonderful cartoon this week, which had two kids (one of whom is holding a needle close to a balloon) approaching a balding middle-aged man reading one of the financial newspapers, with the caption "Watch him jump". Replace the adolescents with today's politicians (actually scratch that, most politicians are still adolescent at least as far as their mental growth is concerned) and the balloon as burst; you have the perfect picture of what happened in the markets.

Anyone looking for the "new normal" doesn't have to look too far from the events that drove this week's trading so far. In summary, academics and economists (reportedly there is a difference between the two) have been searching for a "new normal" for the world economy as it attempts to recover from the crisis of 2007.

What they are missing is that the "new normal" isn't going to be defined by the relative economic growth of various countries or the dynamics of inflation; what will define it (as is increasingly becoming clear) is the return of absolute, gut-wrenching volatility that makes investing a permanent state of siege. In that environment, investor behavior is reactive rather than proactive and surprises abound on both the up and down directions.

Welcome to a new world where the definition of order is a state of continued chaos.

Prison Planet editor Paul Joseph Watson joins Jason Bermas to discuss the contrived establishment media smear attack on Rand Paul, manufactured solely because the status quo is in a blind panic about the threat Paul poses to the system, with polls showing him leading his democratic opponent by a gargantuan 25 points despite the smears.

Last year, the hawks also had their feathers ruffled by Blair’s choice of independent-minded former Ambassador Chas Freeman to be chair of the National Intelligence Council, without clearing this first with White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

The NIC has purview over the preparation of National Intelligence Estimates and the President’ Daily Brief – the two premier intelligence publications.

Blair’s choice of Freeman raised the ire of Washington’s still-influential neoconservatives and their allies in the Obama administration because he was regarded as a “realist” on the Middle East, rather than someone who would side reflexively with Israel.

When rumors began to circulate about Freeman’s appointment, the neocons unleashed a media barrage, denouncing his criticism of Israel and his associations with the Saudi and Chinese governments. One influential column, entitled “Obama’s Intelligence Blunder,” was published Feb. 28 on the Washington Post’s neocon-dominated op-ed page, written by Jon Chait of The New Republic, another important neocon journal.

Global markets have plunged for more than a month, wiping out more than $5.3 trillion in total market value. Ostensibly, the catalyst was Greece's large deficits, but that's only part of the story. Under the terms of the Maastricht Treaty, (aka--the Treaty on European Union) EU countries are not allowed to exceed the treaty's 3 per cent ceiling on fiscal deficits. The nonsensical treaty basically repeals the business cycle by edict. Are recessions forbidden, too?

Sanctimonious German bureaucrats and heads-of-state have taken up the cause of fiscal probity and turned a thoroughly-manageable matter into a full-blown crisis that could break up the EU and drag the world back into deep recession. Keep in mind, Germany has been the main beneficiary of Greek deficits as reflected in their bulging surpluses. One does not exist without the other; and as Keynes pointed out, surplus countries increase global instability by exerting "negative externality". That hasn't stopped German media from finger-wagging at their "spendthrift" neighbors to the south.

Now markets are in a frenzy; volatility has skyrocketed and gauges of market stress (Libor) are steadily rising. Interbank lending has begun to slow. Greek deficits have uncovered the systemic-rot in the EU banking system which is overloaded with garbage assets and non performing loans, only the EU does not have the fiscal/political infrastructure in place to guarantee the dodgy paper. So the pressure on the banks continues to grow and the prospect of another Lehman crash looms larger by the day.

Meanwhile, in Berlin, embattled politicians--who are 100 per cent certain that the "everyone else is to blame"--are sticking to their Hooverian economics plan; balanced budgets, austerity programs, fiscal straight-jackets all around. This is the deficit hawks remedy, too, the Hoover Solution. Take a good look; this is what the U.S. will look like if the Keynes-bashers, the belt-tighteners, and the deficit gloomsters get their way. Great Depression 2.0. Bet on it.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R.-S. C.) is demonstrably a warmonger when it comes to Zionist interests. His sickening sycophancy in March at the American Israeli Political Action Committee dinner, chronicled by David Corn of Mother Jones, tells the tale of the all-too-familiar tape when it comes to what is routinely purchased from American politicians by the Israeli lobby. It has something to do with the world’s oldest profession, if you know what I mean. Want to know what Graham’s hourly fees are for such speeches? Hugh Galford of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs can quote you the specific numbers.

Graham’s AIPAC schtick was as predictable as it was outlandish. Stating that Israel is “our best friend in the world,” the South Carolina pol conveniently forgot to mention the Lavon Affair, the Kennedy assassination, the attack on the USS Liberty, the Pollard spy case, and the Israeli-Communist China pilfering of American nuclear secrets at Los Alamos in the PROMIS catastrophe, among many others. In regard to this last episode, one can only guess at what the late John Tower (R.-TX) and John Heinz (R.-PA) may have known. If only they hadn’t died in aviation accidents in separate parts of the country, only 24 hours apart. What a tragic coincidence.

What Graham did mention was his wholehearted support of the mass murder of Iranians by preemptive military strike. Apparently for him, and sidekick John McCain, constant impingement on Iranian air space; black operations in Azerbaijan, Khuzestan, and Balochistan provinces; and covert American support for the Jundallah–MEK sponsored acts of terrorism and subversion within Iranian borders is not enough. Now we need to be carrying out a massive, overt military strike on that country, despite what our own National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) says about the nuclear weapons program they don’t have. And with an “ally” that is a non-signatory to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and the leading nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons power in the entire region. Got it? Philip Giraldi can brief us. A simple Google search on his name and Iran will tell you more than you may really want to know.

Here’s something else you may not really want to know. According to William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC), a past guest on my radio show, Graham is not only a pro-Zionist warmonger but a homosexual. Arianna Huffington and good friend, Victor Thorn of the American Free Press, have provided us this week with the blow-by-blow account, if you will.

At a joint press conference with Mexico's president, Felipe Calderon, who recently described the Arizona law as "violating the human rights of all people," President Obama delivered a message to "the American people and to the Mexican people" that his administration was taking a hard look at the "troubling" law. Calderon has issued a travel advisory to Mexicans, warning them to avoid Arizona lest they be, well, what exactly? Grabbed, hooded, hustled into a dark cell and never heard from again? Um, no, asked a few questions.

You might think Obama would find a way to make that point, tactfully of course, to our Mexican guest, rather than agreeing that the law amounts to "discrimination." But no, as on so many other occasions on the world stage, Obama finds himself in general agreement with our critics. If we embarrass him, the feeling is mutual.

Is the president aware that in Mexico, police are "required to demand that foreigners prove their legal presence in the country before attending to any issues"?

While the administration was fulminating about the horrific human rights violation the Arizona law represents, Amnesty International was issuing a report about Mexico's mistreatment of its own illegal migrants. "Migrants in Mexico are facing a major human rights crisis leaving them with virtually no access to justice, fearing reprisals and deportation if they complain of abuses," said Rupert Knox, Mexico Researcher at Amnesty International. "Persistent failure by the authorities to tackle abuses carried out against irregular migrants has made their journey through Mexico one of the most dangerous in the world."

Unlike MacArthur, I have returned. Some might ask, "From where?" Others might ask, "So what?" I only ask that you keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times, because we are about to speed things up.

Of course, in view of my silence over the past several months, only partially imposed upon me by unexpected medical "events" (I call it "My Year of Living Surgically"), it wouldn't take much to step up the pace, I suppose. You will see, though. Long-time fans will be pleased to see me returning to the form that I set aside quite some time ago in an attempt to appeal to a broader audience. I am back and I am really, truly pissed.

Today's rant is a status report of sorts and a preview of things to come. Those not already familiar with my work might find the references to be a bit obscure. I think that those who are familiar with me will be delighted at the prospects I raise.

If Barack Obama is sincere in his policy of "no nukes in Iran – no war with Iran," he will halt this rude dismissal of the offer Tehran just made to ship half its stockpile of uranium to Turkey.

Consider what President Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah himself have just committed to do.

Iran will deliver 1,200 kilograms, well over a ton, of its 2-ton stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) to Turkey. In return, Iran will receive, in a year, 120 kilograms of fuel rods for its U.S.-built reactor that produces medical isotopes for treating cancer patients.

Not only did Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and President Lula da Silva of Brazil put their prestige on the line by flying to Tehran, the deal they got is a near-exact replica of the deal Obama offered Iran eight months ago.

Why is President Obama slapping it away? Does he not want a deal? Has he already decided on the sanctions road that leads to war?

On Tuesday, the Tea Party movement scored its first major statewide victory over the Republican establishment. Bowling Green ophthalmologist Rand Paul trounced Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson by 59 percent to 35 percent, winning the GOP nomination to succeed retiring Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY).

Grayson was the handpicked candidate of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. In a normal year, that might have assured him the nomination. Instead such ties became a liability, one Grayson exacerbated by demonstrating a sense of entitlement to a Senate seat last seen when Martha Coakley turned up her nose at shaking hands with voters outside Fenway Park.

Rand Paul tapped into the primary electorate's anger at Barack Obama, bipartisan bailouts of private industry, and the steady growth of the federal government. But the son of 11-term libertarian Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) won in large part because he knew when to follow in his father's footsteps and when to chart his own course.

"Have you ever made an embarrassing mistake?" conservative Christian broadcaster James Dobson asked. Dobson went on to say that he did when he initially endorsed Grayson. "Senior members of the GOP told me Dr. Paul is pro-choice and that he opposes many conservative perspectives, so I endorsed his opponent," Dobson said. "But now I've received further information from OB/GYNs in Kentucky whom I trust, and from interviewing the candidate himself."

The same sloppy legislative writing that created so many unintended consequences in ObamaCare also plagues the DISCLOSE Act, the effort in Congress to tighten spending rules in the wake of the Citizens United decision — and that’s the generous take on the situation. Reason’s Bradley Smith and Jeff Patch warn that the perhaps-unintended consequences of legislative language will allow the FEC to regulate political speech online. The fact that media entities like the New York Times have specific exemptions built into the bill makes the intent, or lack thereof, rather murky:

The bill, however, would radically redefine how the FEC regulates political commentary. A section of the DISCLOSE Act would exempt traditional media outlets from coordination regulations, but the exemption does not include bloggers, only “a communication appearing in a news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities of any broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine or other periodical publication…”

In Citizens United, the Supreme Court explicitly rejected disparate treatment of media corporations and other corporations (including nonprofit groups) in campaign finance law. “Differential treatment of media corporations and other corporations cannot be squared with the First Amendment,” Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.

No legitimate justification exists for excluding media corporations from regulations on political speech applicable to other corporations, unless the goal is to gain the support of editorial boards funded by the New York Times Co.

The candidate who on Tuesday won the special election in a Pennsylvania congressional district is right-to-life and pro-gun. He accused his opponent of wanting heavier taxes. He said he would have voted against Barack Obama's health care plan and promised to vote against cap-and-trade legislation, which is a tax increase supposedly somehow related to turning down the planet's thermostat. This candidate, Mark Critz, is a Democrat.

And that just about exhausts the good news for Democrats on a surreal Tuesday when their presumptive candidate for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut -- the state's attorney general, Richard Blumenthal -- chose to hold a news conference at a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall to discuss why he had falsely said he fought in a foreign war. National Democrats may try to find a less damaged candidate for Connecticut, but first they may have to do that in Illinois.

Their candidate to hold the Senate seat Obama held, Alexi Giannoulias, has a problem: The failure of the bank owned by his family -- it made loans to Tony Rezko, the convicted developer who helped Obama with a 2006 property transaction -- may cost taxpayers many millions. Proving his credentials as a disciple of the president, Giannoulias blamed the bank's failure on George W. Bush.

Illinois Democrats have already had to replace the colorful fellow they nominated for lieutenant governor. Five days after the primary, in a bar, during the Super Bowl, South Side pawnbroker Scott Lee Cohen wept as he bowed out beneath a cloud of controversies about a 2005 arrest for domestic battery against a former girlfriend -- he was accused of holding a knife to her throat -- and complaints of spousal abuse and revelations of steroid use.

People all over America are discussing freedom's future. In short, they are worried. In fact, many are actually talking about State secession. In coffee shops and cafes, and around dining room tables, millions of people are speaking favorably of states breaking away from the union.

Not since the turn of the twentieth century have this many people thought (and spoken) this favorably about the prospect of a State (or group of states) exiting the union. In my mind, this is a good thing.

Even many of those who oppose the prospect of secession understand the increasing tyrannical nature of the current central government in Washington, D.C., and that something must be done about it.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines tyranny as "1: oppressive power . . . 2: a government in which absolute power is vested in a single ruler . . . 3: a rigorous condition imposed by some outside agency or force . . . 4: a tyrannical act."

It is certainly a challenge, when major Western economies are wobbling and statist "solutions" are once again winning favor: What is the best way to describe the mixed economy of China, where statism is a way of life and yet markets keep appearing? Consider two recent actions by the Chinese government. It has proposed requiring local procurement officials to favor products that are based on China's own intellectual property—a strikingly protectionist measure. But it has also announced that it will begin to allow margin trading, short selling and the trading of stock index futures. Chairman Mao would have regarded such investing possibilities as a great leap into the abyss.

According to Ian Bremmer in "The End of the Free Market," China is the exemplar of "state capitalism," a form of government that, he believes, is gaining in popularity throughout the world. Russia and Saudi Arabia are two other well-known practitioners, but state capitalism can be found everywhere—in Africa (Egypt), Eastern Europe (Ukraine), Asia (India) and Latin America (Brazil). While the precise criteria for membership in the state-capitalist club are a bit fuzzy, as Mr. Bremmer admits, the common denominator seems to be that the government (not the private sector) serves as the major economic player and intervenes in the market primarily for political gain.

What is clear is that state-capitalist countries make up ever larger slices of the global economic pie and that free-market economies, like those of the U.S. and the European Union, are doing more and more business with their state-capitalist counterparts. U.S.-China trade, for instance, increased to $400 billion in 2008 from a mere $2.4 billion roughly three decades ago. This integration—and interdependence—is one reason why Mr. Bremmer believes that state capitalism threatens "the future of the global economy": Free-market policies, he says, may lose favor among the world's developing nations, choking off long-term economic growth.

State-capitalist economies are helped by fairly disciplined monetary and fiscal policies, Mr. Bremmer claims, and by the state ownership of valuable natural resources. That last claim is particularly important. Mr. Bremmer notes with alarm that 75% of the world's crude-oil reserves are owned by state-run companies and that the 14 largest of these state-run companies control 20 times more oil and gas than the eight largest multinational corporations. Such proportions give state-capitalist countries a massive source of capital and the opportunity to make mischief (think of Iran and Venezuela). At the same time, their inevitable mismanagement could jeopardize the stability of the world's commodity markets.

Rand Paul has trounced his opponent Trey Grayson in the Kentucky Republican Primary. David Boaz of the Cato Institute writes at the Politico

Rand Paul’s landslide victory in Kentucky over a likable-enough, establishment-backed candidate is a big loss for the neoconservatives and big-government Republicans who tried hard to stop him. As Jonathan Martin reported in POLITICO in March, Vice President Cheney’s circle were desperately warning conservatives and Republicans about “Rand Paul’s troubling and dangerous views on foreign policy.” Cheney issued his first 2010 endorsement to Trey Grayson a week later. David Frum and other defenders of the Bush-Cheney foreign policy piled on. Mitch McConnell pulled out all the stops. Grayson ran an ad featuring the clash between Giuliani and Ron Paul over the causes of 9/11, and Rudy endorsed Grayson. And Rand Paul appears to be beating Grayson by 25 points. That’s a real poke in the eye to the Republican establishment and the neocons in the Cheney orbit.

The Wilsonian conservatives desperately want to stifle any real debate on perpetual intervention within the Republican party. That’s why they tried so hard to stop a Republican Senate candidate who questioned the war in Iraq and the surge in Afghanistan. But that debate may yet break out.

As I've said elsewhere, a victory in the general election would insure that

...the Ron Paul Revolution would continue. While the elder Paul continues to inspire, he is 74 years old. When he’s retired, all the energy that his movement has brought together will need a major office holder to remain relevant on a national scale. Rand is only forty-five and if he gets elected to the US Senate is probably at least a shoe-in to win the CPAC Straw Poll the first year his father decides not to run.

The U.S. Senate is moving forward with a $59 billion spending bill, of which $33.5 billion would be allocated for the war in Afghanistan.

However, some experts in Washington are raising concerns that the war may be unwinnable and that the money being spent on military operations in Afghanistan could be better spent.

“We’re making all of the same mistakes the Soviets made during their time in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, and they left in defeat having accomplished none of their purposes,” Michael Intriligator, a senior fellow at the Milken Institute, said Monday at a half-day conference hosted by the New America Foundation and Economists for Peace and Security.

“I think we’re repeating that, and it’s a history we’re condemned to repeat,” he said.

Debt woes in Greece have sent bond yields soaring and increased the prospect of sovereign default. A restructuring of Greek debt will deal a blow to lenders in Germany and France that are insufficiently capitalized to manage the losses. Finance ministers, EU heads-of-state and the European Central Bank (ECB) have responded forcefully to try to avert another banking meltdown that could plunge the world back into recession. They have created a nearly-$1 trillion European Stabilization Fund (ESF) to calm markets and ward-off speculators. But the contagion has already spread beyond Greece to Spain, Portugal and Italy where leaders have started to aggressively cut public spending and initiate austerity programs. Belt-tightening in the Eurozone will decrease aggregate demand and threaten the fragile recovery. We are at a critical inflection point.

From American Banker:

"Bank stocks plunged last week under the theory that banking companies will take large losses in Europe. The theory is correct. Banks will get hurt," Richard Bove of Rochdale Securities LLC wrote in a research note.Bove wrote in a separate report last week that "big American banks have a bigger stake in this drama than thought." He estimates that JPMorgan Chase has $1.4 trillion of exposure across all of Europe alone, while Citigroup Inc. has $468.4 billion.

Analysts said large U.S. banks have opaque ties to the region through their overseas counterparts. U.S. money-center banks trade derivatives, orchestrate currency swaps and handle other transactions with large European banks. U.S. banks may not hold a lot sovereign debt in Europe, but those European institutions do. If Greece defaults, that could create a crisis of confidence in the European banking market that would spread to large U.S. banks.

In 1999, the Moscow office of the Gorbachev Foundation granted access to its vast digital archive to a limited number of vetted Russian history researchers. One of them was Pavel Stroilov. Parts of the archive were password restricted, but Stroilov noticed he could see the password by peeking whenever the office archivist booted the system. He memorized it and for several visits managed to access and secretly copy volumes of folders amounting to 50,000 documents.

Stroilov couldn't believe what he read. The restricted documents were the KGB transcripts of private and secret conversations of Mikhail Gorbachev during his years as leader of the Soviet Union (1985-1992.)

In a recent interview with urban policy magazine City Journal, he said they "tell a completely new story about the end of the Cold War. The 'commonly accepted' version of history of that period consists of myths almost entirely. These documents are capable of ruining each of those myths."

Stroilov decided the facts had to be available to the public. He emigrated to London knowing he'd be a wanted man in Russia. He was right about that. What he hadn't expected was that no publisher or media outlet in the world was interested in publishing the Gorbachev archives. No library wants to house them or fund their translation. "In fact, he can't get anyone to take much interest in them all."

Among the mega-forces moving the tectonic plates and imperiling the nation-states of the world from above and below are these:

First, ethno-nationalism, which threatens nations with secession and break-up. We see it in the Uighurs of China, the Naga of India, the Baluch of Iran and Pakistan, the Kurds of Iran, Syria, Iraq and Turkey, the Chechens of the Russian Caucasus and the Walloons of Belgium.

Second, transnationalism. This is the project of global elites who seek to reduce nations to ethno-cultural enclaves in a new world order run by these same bloodless bureaucrats whose loyalty is neither to the land nor people whence they came.

Their work in progress, the European Union, however, is imperiled.

For the EU just took a great leap forward to force Europe's most indebted nations to surrender their economic independence or be expelled from the European Monetary Union. The PIGS -- Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain -- may rebel.

Paul, speaking publicly for the first time since the Senate passed a watered down version of his HR1207 amendment to fully audit the Fed, said that those who had essentially voted for more Fed power would see repercussions.

“The Federal Reserve is a big issue and those individuals who voted against auditing the Fed, there will be a political price to pay for that, just as much as those who voted for the bailout.” The Congressman said.

SEC Chair Mary Schapiro made a stunning admission during House subcommittee hearings last week seeking answers to the May 6 hit and run in the stock market which briefly trimmed 998 points off the Dow and caused massive losses to small investors who had placed stop loss orders on individual stocks.

According to Ms. Schapiro, the SEC has no consolidated audit trail that captures time and sales in a chronological order among the 40 or more electronic trading platforms and exchanges that constitute today’s deeply fragmented U.S. stock market.

Ms. Schapiro said in her testimony before the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance and Government Sponsored Enterprises that there were 66 million trades on May 6, coming from the 40 or more stock trading venues. The SEC has requested the individual trading records and must figure out how to review all the disparate trading in sequential time order. Some trading records reside at unregulated entities like hedge funds. Other trades are done by dark pools, internal matching of buys and sells inside brokerage firms (benignly called internalization) and over the counter derivative trades that could impact the stock market but have no oversight by anyone. Ms. Schapiro said she has issued subpoenas but didn’t say to whom.

Ms. Schapiro’s testimony raises the question as to whether the SEC has been properly monitoring potentially rigged trading in real time up to this point.

The gangster government now in control in our nation’s capitol is a grim and repugnant reminder that freedom, at best, is ephemeral. At worst, it’s a myth. In fact, true freedom – like true capitalism – has never existed anywhere on this planet. Rest assured that those with an insatiable lust for power will never allow either to occur.

The boldest experiment in doing away with dictatorial government was the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and perhaps the most important words in that document are:

… whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

… But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

When voters go to the polls Tuesday for U.S. Senate primary elections in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, they'll write a new act in the ongoing shake-up of the Republican political establishment that's being led by conservative freshman Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina.

In Kentucky, GOP voters will choose between Trey Grayson — the handpicked choice of the state's most powerful Republican, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — and DeMint-backed Rand Paul, son of former Libertarian Party presidential candidate — and current Texas congressman — Ron Paul.

In Pennsylvania, Democrats will select Rep. Joe Sestak or incumbent Sen. Arlen Specter, who bolted the Republican Party last year after DeMint became the first Republican senator to endorse Specter's opponent, former Rep. Pat Toomey, in the GOP primary.

DeMint's impact — through endorsements and money from his Senate Conservatives Fund — has also been felt in recent weeks in Florida, Indiana and Utah, and it will reverberate throughout the summer in California, Colorado and beyond.

It's well-known that a major frustration for white advocates is the lack of opportunities for activism. A person first makes the slow and sometimes painful transition from "conservative" or "libertarian" to racially conscious white person (as in "No, I'm not a hater of random black or Jewish people, but would you look at the raw deal whites in America are getting, for God's sake?"). The more they delve into the writings, and match them up with current events, the more clearly they understand the issues facing whites. But aside from posting on the Internet, there's not much they can do.

Many would put themselves at grave risk of being fired from their employment, as the examples of Sam Francis, Kevin Lamb, Michael Regan and countless others show.

Some organizations, as the erudite Wilmot Robertson observed, consist of nothing more than a weird collection of undercover government agents, informers and oddballs. I recall attending some National Alliance meetings several years ago and thinking that some of the attendees mirrored his observation.

I think this is a very harmful state of affairs. Some deal with "activus interruptus" by simply drifting away. Others may deal with it through foolhardy outbursts that accomplish nothing.

Who's Supreme Court?

It’s official. Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman have signaled the end of their political careers. The two have introduced what they’ve titled the “American Power Act.” Yep, it’s a global warming bill – Cap-n-Trade, Cap-n-Tax, etc. The premise for this bill is that the industrial emissions of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) are causing global temperatures to rise and to prevent global catastrophe the industrialized world must reduce its emissions of CO2.

A pork and power bill based on global warming propaganda has been a priority for the Obama administration. Given that it has already been established, absolutely, that predictions of catastrophic man-made global warming are a scam, you might question the two senators’ sanity for introducing one. But new benefits to Israel have recently been negotiated, which might be all it takes to make Joe Lieberman happy. And it’s very easy to imagine a chat between John Kerry and Al Gore that ends with Al Gore saying, “Yah, but the money is good.”

Kerry’s term isn’t over until 2014, when he will be 71 years old, so retirement isn’t an unreasonable choice anyway. Lieberman is about the same age with his current term ending two years earlier.

Investor’s Business Daily describes the bill as “cap-and-trade meets pork-barrel spending.” It’s about regulations, restrictions and research. The bill creates some 60 new agencies and projects to eat up our tax dollars and buy support.

MIT Professor Noam Chomsky’s speaking tour of the Middle East was cut short today, when Israeli border troops barred him from entering the West Bank by way of Jordan. Chomsky was scheduled to speak at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank on Monday.

Israeli officials did not provide any specific reason for Chomsky’s ban, but the Interior Ministry suggested that once it was revealed that Chomsky only intended to visit the occupied West Bank and not Israel itself they contacted the military to try to get the ban rescinded.

According to Chomsky the border guards told him the Israeli government “doesn’t like the kind of things I say.” The 82-year-old, a self-described anarchist, says he told them no governments like anything he says.

With the announcement of "rescue packages" for Greece and other European countries facing ruin, we have heard cheers from the Usual Suspects, beginning with the New York Times, which declared in an editorial:

Europe's leaders stared into the abyss and finally decided to act. The nearly $1 trillion bailout package, arranged over the weekend, is intended to head off Greece's default and stop the crisis from dragging under other weak economies -- Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy are all vulnerable.

The European and American markets celebrated on Monday. The CAC-40 index in Paris rose almost 10 percent. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 3.9 percent. It was certainly the right thing to do. Coupled with the European Central Bank's promise to buy bonds from stricken European countries, it arrested the financial turmoil -- at least for now.

The last sentence is unintentionally prophetic, for whatever "good effects" the bailout supposedly will create, they will be short and will pave the way for future crises. While Greece and other European countries have been facing disaster, it is nothing like the disaster that looms because the economic piper has yet to be paid.

In the famous Charles Schulz comic strip, Peanuts, Charlie Brown is enticed every year by Lucy to placekick a football that she volunteers to hold for him. Charlie runs down the field toward his beguiling friend, who is holding the football on the ground, and swings his leg in a huge arching kick. But at the last moment Lucy jerks the football away and Charlie flies through the air to land on his back with a loud thump and the scream of "Aaugh!" Every year, Lucy convinces Charlie to try another kick, promising not to pull the football away like she did last time. And every year, Charlie runs down the field and Lucy jerks the football away at the last moment with Charlie falling on his famous fanny.

Why does Charlie continue to fall for Lucy's con? Because Charlie is a good-natured chap, but gullible about human nature. This priceless scene, which played out every year from the 1950s to 2000 in newspapers all over the world, is metaphor for that exasperating trait of large amounts of humans to fall for the beguiling promises of their fellowmen who seek something from them. Much of history is made -- from the daily mundane events of our personal lives to the grand, epochal affairs of nations -- because of this naïve trust that so many humans have in the professed benevolence of persuasive fellow humans who wish to enlist their support for a cause, a vote, a job, a war, a venture, a romance, etc. The world is full of guile because it is full of fools.Thus life for us as individuals and societies keeps running off the road into messy ditches of disaster.

America is no stranger to the ditches along with the fools who persist in driving us there; and the world of politics is an excellent arena to demonstrate this fact. For over four decades now from 1968 to 2010, the Republican Party hierarchy has been playing the role of Lucy to Charlie Brown conservatives. Every election year GOP politicians promise to millions of traditional conservatives among the party that if they will donate their money, time and votes to elect them, they as Republicans will vigorously challenge the "horrid Democrats" who are obtusely driving America into ditches of disaster. But year after year, just like conniving Lucy, the Republicans we send to Washington go back on their promises and proceed to do as the Democrats do.

We are all still stuck in the "big Muddy." No, not the wars of old or even the oil disaster. The mud I am referring to is more like quicksand and it sucks anyone who wants to look at what happened in the financial crisis deeper and deeper into it.

Soon, you are buried in shifting sea of so-called "exotic financial instruments," and tranches, derivatives, credit default swaps, naked short-selling, etc and so forth, ad fin item. It's murkier in there than in the oil-infested waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Stop, my head hurts.

A far simpler explanation, pervasive fraud and financial crime, has been ignored by most of our economic geniuses. As I made my film Plunder The Crime of Our Time offering a "crime narrative," I ran up against the denial that greeted my 2006 film In Debt We Trust warning of a meltdown. Then I was called, a "doom and gloomer." Now I have just been ignored or considered simplistic.

Why is that? There are cultural and ideological reasons. The world of finance is dominated by the elite of the elite, up-right citizens all, including many philanthropists and patrons of the arts. How could such important "big men" ever be accused of slimy crimes?